danny la rouge
Ninja swords for all disabled people
I'd forgotten that one. Yes, you're right, he did give that as a possibility.
Theos invents another huge cultural problem which "only religion" can solve
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cesare
shady's dreams ♥
Yep, looks interesting. And further than the suicide rate you just described, his view on the role of religion for societies.
Jonti
what the dormouse said
The fact you do not really understand science leads you to tilt at windows. Evolutionary biology does not work at the level of any determinist understanding. Evolutionary biologists will readily assent to the notion that if you replayed the earth's history from the same initial conditions, evolution may yet give different results.
There are different ways to interpret that fact, one of which is to say that biological activity (inter alia, presumably) can create information. The reasoning here is that there is no need to claim that "all the information in the genome of every species that has ever lived, or will ever live, anywhere in the universe, was already present in the world's initial conditions".
Evolution provides a far more elegant and parsimonious account of biological diversity, just because it is not a determinist theory.
It's odd you haven't tumbled to that. You're not trolling, are you?
danny la rouge
Ninja swords for all disabled people
Yes, although Weber was better on religion. The classic comparison is between Weber and Marx on the subject. You might alaso look at RH Tawney.
danny la rouge
Ninja swords for all disabled people
Tilting at windows. I like that. Very Quixotic.
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
I'm a bit more familiar with Weber, not much though. What's the comparison with Marx then?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
A thought on this as it is a fair point.
The examples I gave of bees, termites and naked mole rats are all eusocial, with just one queen producing all the offspring for the colony. I don't know of any animal that produces different castes like this (other than male/female) that doesn't do so using the single queen/colony process. Even in meerkat colonies, just one pair's offspring will survive.
So in these cases, treating the colony as one unit makes sense even if you are looking at it from a gene survival point of view. In such cases, it probably isn't helpful to talk of group selection, in fact. The pressures acting on all members of the colony are all pressures operating on just one reproducing female. This overcomes all the difficulties with group selection theory that are highlighted in the wiki article.
I'd be very interested to hear if anyone can come up with an example of an animal that produces different castes but does not live in a eusocial colony.
Sorry for the derail, dlr. It's a point I wanted to clarify.
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
You can't have such a colony, because all the specialization for the various castes detract from the capacity to reproduce. And if there's not just one queen (male role is cheaper) the balance between competition and co-operation seem to get too fuzzed to have a caste of breeders all producing for the same nursery. Producing different castes for that matter. Colony integrity would become a difficult balancing act, overly elaborate and not like a peacocks wing.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I suspect you are right, that such a colony could not develop – as I said, even where there are not castes proper, such as in a meerkat colony, just one female will reproduce. So this is not properly an example of group selection.
Hmmm, I may be talking myself out of my earlier hypothesis.
As to the development of separate sexes, that needs more thought/reading, I think.
Hmmm, I may be talking myself out of my earlier hypothesis.
As to the development of separate sexes, that needs more thought/reading, I think.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
That's a bit harsh, don't you think.Are you one of those people that tests out half-assed theories by arguing them on the internet?
I still take issue with the idea of seeing evolution primarily from the level of the gene. However, in this particular case, I clearly stated that my hypothesis was untested and could well be wrong. It was so half-arsed that nobody refuted it, and I had to refute it myself when I realised that it was flawed.
Whenever I state something that I suspect may be a 'half-arsed theory', I always clearly indicate as such, and I did so in this case.
If you wish to further your thinking, you have to be prepared to sometimes look a bit foolish when you get things wrong.
revol68
what, fucking what?
She's alright in a Michael Douglas sort of a way.
She's no Zizek, infact she probably has guilty thoughts about him doing her up the 'lack' when she's getting head off some Bay Area bulldyke.
Have we met?
danny la rouge
Ninja swords for all disabled people
In a nutshell, did the reformation take place because of changes in economic structure of society, or did the economic structure of society enable the reformation?
For Marx, religion is part of the process of alienation. The worker loses contact with the creation of his/her labour; instead of being an artisan crafting an object, s/he is a cog in a machine churning out commodities whose value s/he will not personally realize. In this process of alienation from ones species being, one becomes open to religion. For Weber, it is about meaning and context and interaction, and he introduces the notion of verstehen to discuss how protestantism becomes the 'spirit of capitalism'.
That's nowhere near enough, and it's a very long time since I did this stuff, but that's a simplified taster.
If you wish to further your thinking, you have to be prepared to sometimes look a bit foolish when you get things wrong.
That's a excellent policy. There's no harm in being wrong - you can only learn. I also think it's good to get your ideas down on the page - I often find that I can only see the flaws in my thoughts after they are written down.
